President Trump is rapidly pushing the country toward an authoritarian state, but everyday Americans may not care. Since taking office in January, the White House’s actions have been head-spinning and distracting, with the probable intention of creating a blur in public perception. Now, with persistent questions about the president’s relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the diversionary tactics have accelerated. This week alone, the president presided over the federal takeover of the Washington, D.C., police and sent in the National Guard on the false pretense of an extraordinary crime wave.
Even on his signature issue, immigration, Mr. Trump has done more harm than good. Illegal border crossings have fallen sharply, but at the same time, his administration has broken families apart, wrongly imprisoned legal residents and visitors, and generally torn up the United States Constitution. His supporters may say that sending people to a grim El Salvador prison or containing them in a shipping container in Djibouti is part of a strategy to dissuade would-be migrants. We believe that the neglect of human rights represented in these examples and many others, including at a slapdash detention center in the Florida Everglades, is unacceptable and diminishes the U.S. as a nation.
The scope of the Trumpian exercise of power is broad. It includes telling corporations whom they should fire, bringing universities to heel, cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and imposing arbitrary import tariffs that could bring on a worldwide recession. White House policies are accelerating the pace of global warming with a retrograde push of fossil fuels.
Bribes are a feature of the Trump administration. Historians say that the level of presidential corruption is unprecedented. Consider Qatar’s gift of a multimillion-dollar mothballed luxury aircraft, for one. Mr. Trump’s supporters are selling access to the president via a crypto currency meme-coin — netting him and his family about $400 million. Dinners at the president’s Mar-a-Lago in Florida costing $1 million per person benefit him directly. It is no surprise that with the acquiescence of Congress Mr. Trump is giving tax breaks to the rich, gutting Medicaid and other social services to pay for it.
The administration has attacked higher education, weaponizing antisemitism in its opposition to diversity efforts that were paradoxically designed to correct decades of discrimination. Student loans have been cut. University research grants have been withdrawn, threatening to set back U.S. biomedical advances, all in a thinly veiled effort to make institutions whiter under the guise of fairness or merit.
He is punishing law firms that have worked on matters he does not like. A redrawing of Texas election district maps may set off Democratic retaliation, further undermining our representative form of government. He has supported ethnic cleansing in Gaza and withdrawn food and medicine aid, imperiling millions more lives around the world.
Mr. Trump has disbanded a division of the F.B.I. that investigated congressional misconduct and fraud within federal agencies, fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, and fired or demoted at least 20 agency inspectors general. Privacy protections at the Internal Revenue Service are soon to be eliminated. Mr. Trump issued an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of noncitizens, a direct violation of the 14th Amendment. In downright petty moves, he rechristened the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and took over the Kennedy Center. He pardoned the Jan. 6 convicts. All of this has been with the abject agreement of the Republican Congress. The real question is, do Americans still care about what truly made this country great?